A friend of mine recently attended a rally at the State House, one of the many anti-Trump protests that are happening all over the country right now. Videos of these events, and my conversations with those who have attended the protests in my State, seem to be centered around a hatred of Elon Musk and Donald Trump (including anyone who voted for him), combined with pleas to the Democrats to do something.
I do not support Donald Trump, I want to make that clear. But hating on Trump and his followers provides no solution to our current problems. Hatred further divides the public, which only makes it easier for the oligarchs (like Elon Musk) to control us.
Also, all these protests are mostly populated by those who seem to believe that voting for Democrats is somehow a solution, ignoring how things have gotten worse for most of us for decades, no matter which party held the majority in Washington, DC.
The Democrats’ populist moment is over. Four years after then-candidate Joe Biden promised a public healthcare option, the PRO Act and a $15 minimum wage, the codification of Roe v. Wade, tuition-free community college, and an end to President Trump’s border wall, Kamala Harris is running on a xenophobic, anti-immigrant, business-friendly platform to Biden’s right. Not only did the Biden-Harris administration fail to deliver on all of these promises — they paved the way for the reactionary forces that Harris seeks to vanquish on November 5. (link)
For those who just started paying attention, now that Trump’s edicts are beginning to affect them (and not just the oppressed who have long suffered under our two-party system), it’s time for a quick education on how we got here, and what needs to be done to help turn this situation around.
The rightward shift embodied in Harris’s campaign is not just a cynical ploy of the Democratic Party; it is part of an attempt to strengthen a weakened bipartisan regime in an uncertain scenario of economic and political challenges abroad and domestically, a process that has accelerated in the last four years. It entails the disciplining of the Left with the aid of the progressive wing and NGOs and a normalization of the policies of the Right, even as the Democrats paint themselves as the antithesis of Trump. For their part, members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have not only given up their own once-ambitious policy proposals that could have taken some of the wind out of the sails of the Right’s popularity, but they have also hamstrung the fight against the Far Right by mounting no meaningful opposition to its embrace by the party. A vote for Biden did not stop attacks on reproductive rights or on LGBTQ+ people and voting rights. Democrats and Republicans alike have intervened to repress the movements that are fighting to protect our democratic rights. Painting the Democrats as a lesser evil is just sending us into the fray without a weapon. (link) (bold emphasis my own)
No one is coming to save us. We need to save ourselves. Protests won’t make much of a difference if we keep supporting our current two-party (actually uni-party) system.
The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale. Otherwise there is anarchy, repression and the resurgence of tribal parties and federalism. The national government, if it wants to be national, ought to govern by the people and for the people, for the outcasts and by the outcasts. No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. (bold emphasis my own)
Protest for your rights. Protest for the rights of the oppressed and vulnerable among us. Protest for peace.
But, please don’t protest only against Trump and his gang, without including a protest against the corrupt system (Democrats included) that brought us to this point.